


Five times Newton Pulsifer confounded the universe with his inability to use an electronic device

by doomed_spectacles



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 5 Things, 5 Times, Aziraphale and Crowley are sirs not appearing in this fic, Gen, Humor, Metafiction, Newt Pulsifer appreciation hour, No Romance, Sortof, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29147481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomed_spectacles/pseuds/doomed_spectacles
Summary: What it says on the tin: five times Newt tries to do something, and what actually happens when he does.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 29





	Five times Newton Pulsifer confounded the universe with his inability to use an electronic device

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this solely because I needed 412 words get to 200k words on ao3. Go me!

At eight years old, while playing Pac-Man in an arcade at the London Trocadero, Newt accidentally won and achieved a high score by setting his bookbag down on the game's controller stick, then tangling the strap on it and twisting it to and fro in a frantic effort to free his bag. When asked to put in his initials, he input a code that gave all players currently playing in the arcade a score mathematically impossible to achieve by a human player, thus forever enshrining them in the high score hall of fame for whichever game they were playing.

* * *

While helping a Tesco's cashier replace the receipt tape in a credit card machine, he put the roll in backward. When he took it out and switched it around, he hit a series of buttons that wiped out the prices on all items, causing the store to give out over £5,000 in free food before the error was fixed.

* * *

After being given an iPod by a well-meaning auntie for Christmas, Newt plugged it into her computer but instead of adding music to it, he managed to erase the free U2 album that had been pushed unknowingly to the accounts of everyone connected to the internet using his aunt's internet service provider.

* * *

Riding in a friend's car while Dick Turpin was being repaired, he set the sat-nav to direct them to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park. It misinterpreted his directions, causing a massive traffic pileup that extended all the way to the M-25, thereby blocking the getaway driver actively involved in a multi-million-pound jewel heist.

(Crowley, meanwhile, was deprived of a commendation for his part in making London commuters' lives miserable, credit instead going to the human who invented speech pattern recognition, something Crowley wished he'd had the foresight to suggest but hadn't.)

* * *

When he won a free fitness tracking watch in a raffle, Newt bought a jaunty orange band for it and wore it jogging for a week, happily watching his number of steps rise. He then forgot to take it off when swimming, and, when he plugged it into his mother's computer to sync the data to the cloud, nudged a German spy satellite a few degrees to the west. Hundreds of miles away, an eagle-eyed intelligence officer watching the footage noticed something suspicious in the feed and managed to uncover a long sought-after human trafficking ring. Subsequently, charges were brought against dozens of people in the International Criminal Court.


End file.
